John Freeman

English novelist Julian Barnes has a yen for literary curios. Strolling around his North London home, he picks up one signed photograph of a great author after another--Turgenev, Kipling, Borges--handing them over with the excitement of a true fan. "Who do you think this is?" he asks, presenting an antique postcard of a man in shorts. It turns out to be a gag photo T.S. Eliot took of himself, which he then sent to a friend. Apparently Mr. Prufrock's creator had a sense of humor about himself.

Barnes' fiction can be a similar funhouse mirror for writers' lives. His genre-bending meditation on authorship, "Flaubert's Parrot," featured a retiring English doctor who had become obsessed with one of the French novelist's stuffed birds. His latest novel, "Arthur & George," resurrects detective novelist Arthur Conan Doyle around the time the author began raising a hullabaloo about the real-life case of George Edalji, a part-Indian solicitor from Birmingham railroaded for mutilating farm animals--a crime he did not commit.

"Flaubert's Parrot" seemed pretty hard on our desire to know more about a writer than just our work. And yet here you are writing about another novelist. Has your mood changed?

No, but Conan Doyle is a very different character. Flaubert had very strong opinions about journalistic prurience--he used to go into tirades about it--but Doyle was a famous man and a public figure. He was the sort of writer who was used to being in the open.

How did you stumble upon the case of George Edalji?

I came across him reading about the Dreyfus Affair in fact. And once I found out that Doyle began investigating George's plight at the same time he fell in love with a woman who wasn't his wife--that's when I knew there was a story there.

There are some pretty grim passages in this book about the racist persecution George suffers even before he is arrested for (supposedly) mutilating the farm animals. Did you ever find yourself swept up in some of the passions Arthur feels?

I don't think as a writer you can do that. Sure, it was upsetting, but as a novelist what you are trying to set up this machine, this narrative, you hope to ratchet up the reader's sense of injustice--even if you know in the end it will be somewhat unresolved.

So how did you get into the period?

Newspapers were good, and Conan Doyle's autobiography was quite useful. In writing the book, I found that a few antiquated words could go a long way--give the illusion of the time without actually using that many phrases. In any case, I didn't want to write an entire book in Edwardian prose. It becomes a bit like one of those gauzy historical dramas they play on Sunday afternoons. Or like repro furniture.

So here and there you used words like oleaginous to get the period across?

Yes, oleaginous as in "oily." At one time it was a sort of anti-Semitic shorthand for Jewish. And it often was applied to villains.

Was it hard to write this book without thinking about how it applies to justice today?

When I am writing I am only in the book, but yes, it's hard yes because we're not that different, are we? For instance, there was that case in England eight or nine years ago where an Englishmen of West Indian origins was found hanging from his belt from the park gates. And the police didn't turn anything up. His nephew started asking questions and not long after was found hanging from his belt from the park gates, too. The police merely remarked on how unusual it was that they used the same method to kill themselves. It takes a great shaming case to change things usually and for a while it gets better.

Have you ever been so enraged about something in the public sphere that you decided, "OK, that's it, I'm going to write a political novel?"

No, because it's not what I feel the novel is for. I think the novel is meant to tell a story and to convince you to believe in it. You keep this other stuff separate, at least you try to. I work hard to create a separate compartment where I can get these thoughts out--in an opinion piece, say. I've watched as some English novelists I admire do the opposite and I think their work has coarsened as a result.

But some events are so big it must be hard not to engage them, like 9/11?

That's interesting because I just read the new novel by Jay McInerney, who is a friend of mine, and I did so with great apprehension, because it takes place around the time of those attacks. But I thought he handled it beautifully since he comes at it from a bit of a side angle.

I guess you could say the same about Ian McEwan's "Saturday."

True, but I was slightly surprised at the way it was taken up as a novel about life after 9/11--there is certainly a hunger out there for that kind of book about the moment, which I think it was why Philip Roth's "The Plot Against America" was read as an analog for life under the Bush administration.... I read it simply as a brilliant tale about the way a family can be threatened.

Julian Barnes reads at the Newberry Library, 60 West Walton, on February 6.

(2006-01-31)

Also by John Freeman

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"If we know anything about man," writes Larry McMurtry in this grim but stirring little book, "it's that he's not pacific"
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Nonfiction Review
The thirteen men and women featured in this oral history were sent to prison for crimes they did not commit. Some languished for years on death row. Others were sentenced to life in prison. And yet they consider themselves fortunate
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Fiction Review
By 1957, the year he published "On the Road," Jack Kerouac was at the end of his rope
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Poetry Review
Great art feels inevitable--so that in the moment of experiencing it, the painting or the dance becomes eternal. We cannot imagine the world before it, or without it
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Nonfiction Review
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Fiction Review
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Nonfiction Review
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Rush Hour
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Nonfiction Review
(2005-08-23)

About Face
(2005-08-02)

Fiction Review
(2005-07-05)

Superhero
(2005-06-28)

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